“The
focus on framing the ‘benefits’ of community gardening in moderate
and instrumental terms has even led some to argue that
community gardens have become implements of neoliberal governmentality,
implicit in the shifting of social and economic responsibility from the state
to the household and ‘community’.”

Community gardens had its roots in the Victory gardens of World War
II are an increasingly popular form of
urban agriculture. Urban agriculture initiatives
focusing on communal urban food production have a long history and have taken
many forms around the world. Through whichever form communal garden activities
have taken, they have played significant roles in ensuring food security in
times of national crisis. Notably, this occurred throughout the two World Wars,
during the Great Depression and in the 1970s Oil Crisis.[3]

The history of urban gardening in the
United States demonstrates a cyclical process of urban garden creation and
destruction that moves in conjunction with economic crisis and recovery. Victory gardens were developed in the United States
to support the war effort and to supplement food production at home during a
time when much of the agricultural labor force was overseas.[4]Widely
advertised and popularized, victory gardens marked a shift away from gardening
as only a recreational activity or for hard times. Not only were the gardens
seen as a method to promote food sovereignty and help the war effort but they
were also important social activity.[5]

In the 1970s the Lower East Side of
Manhattan was the center stage for a burgeoning urban gardening movement taking
place throughout the city. Urban gardens were sprouting in low-income
neighborhoods of the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Manhattan in response to a need to
reclaim and revitalize a way of life to counter the decaying landscape. NYC
experienced one of their worst fiscal crises in history. Cutbacks in public services
affected low-income neighborhoods the worst. By 1977 there were more than
25,000 vacant lots in New York City. Today there are still 11,000 vacant lots,
but

there are also approximately 650
community gardens serving 20,000 urban residents on 200 acres of open space.
Throughout New York City, urban residents have taken the initiative to use
vacant lots for the community’s benefit through the creation of community
gardens.[6]

Much of the literature produced about
community gardens has
aimed to strengthen the legitimacy of community gardening and to identify and
demonstrate the range of tangible outcomes community gardens provide to individuals and communities.
Partial, but nonetheless useful, views of community
gardening have been provided by accounts of them as sites of leisure, health
promotion, community development, urban greening and sustainability, the
development of social capital, learning and skills development, cultural maintenance
and production, inter-cultural interaction, urban agriculture and self-provisioning in times of
economic need. The focus on framing the ‘benefits’ of community
gardening in moderate and instrumental terms
has even led some to argue that community gardens have become implements of
neoliberal governmentality, implicit in the shifting of social and economic responsibility from the state
to the household and ‘community’.[7]

Accounts of community gardening as a
form of collective social action are rare. Social action provides a useful
frame for capturing some of the experiences and perspectives of community
gardeners that lie beyond the

bounds of policy discourse. But while
academic analysis of community gardening in
terms of social change is limited, the use of community gardening for social change has been receiving attention
within social movements. Community
gardening has recently been adopted as a political performance by a number of radical social
movements. Community gardens are frequently mentioned in writings from and
about broad global justice and anti-capitalist movements, for example. Within
these movements, there has been some shift in emphasis away from the mass
protests and ‘summit hopping’ of the ‘Battle of Seattle’ and ‘Global Carnival
Against Capital’ in 1999 towards creating alternatives to capitalism and the state,
building community infrastructure and developing sustainable cultural
practices. Community gardens have been identified by movement writers as an
exemplar of this alternative-building approach, along with co-operatives,
independent media producers, neighbourhood assemblies and community housing
associations. However, in short, although mentions of community gardening have become
frequent in writing from and about social justice and environmental activism,
even here there has been little analysis of the relationships between community
gardening and social change.[8]

The
relationship between community gardening and guerrilla gardening is an unsteady
one. Community gardening has a definite set of practices and meanings produced
through the practice of gardening but also through normalized meanings and
expectations on what a community garden is. Conversely, guerrilla gardening is
still emerging and firm definitions have yet to be developed. Guerrilla
gardening is a gardening or planting in an unadministered way in an urban
space. It is not performed by a specific state or official organization.
Instead, it is an individual or a group of individuals who frequently operate
spontaneously, anonymously and voluntarily. While there may or may not be
unlawful activity the lack of explicit permission and unexpected nature allow
for guerrilla gardening to be a form of spatial intervention. This connotation
of spatial intervention adds an element of subversion or transgression that is
not found in other forms of urban agriculture, most notably community
gardening. In this way guerrilla gardening relies upon more legitimized forms
of urban agriculture to derive relational meanings and practices. Through
guerrilla gardening, which frequently occurs in forgotten urban space,
questions about who decides how urban space is used and for what means are
called into mind. This notion of guerrilla gardening as a critique of city
space is absent from mainstream sources. Likewise, despite differences on an
underlying ideological basis, both mainstream and alternative media sources
focus on the technical aspects and actual practice of community gardening.[9]

“Community Gardening: An Annotated Bibliographyincludes brief descriptions of guidebooks and
manuals, books, honours and masters theses, articles in academic and
professional journals, and a number of other research-based documents, such as
project evaluations and submissions. In addition, there are brief introductions
to sources on key areas that provide additional context and evidence for
community gardening: therapeutic horticulture, urban agriculture, organics and
permaculture. The emphasis is on furthering understanding of community
gardening in Australia. Hence we have attempted to be exhaustive in our
inclusion of Australian sources. Community Gardening: An Annotated Bibliographyalso includes many sources from and about North
America and Britain.”

Community Gardening
as Social Action. Claire Nettle. Ashgate. May 2014.

There has been a
resurgence of interest in gardening from academics recently – from Lisa
Taylor’sA Taste for
Gardening(2008) to George
McKay’sRadical Gardening(2011) and Clare Hickman’sTherapeutic
Landscapes(2013). Claire
Nettle’s contribution,Community
Gardening as Social Action, marks another welcome addition to this growing
area of study. Nettles, a community food systems researcher and consultant,
aims to examine the social and political role of community gardens in Australia
from a social movement standpoint.[10]

This paper presents outlines of a
theoretical approach to food systems that attempts to decenter “food” in food-related
research, placing social life as the central point of departure for a critical
analysis of food systems and the search for revolutionary alternatives. “Food,”
in this framework, is conceived relationally, as a “nodal point of
interconnection” (Massey 1994) through which multiple historical, spatial, and
social processes intersect and articulate with one another. If “race…is the
modality by which class is lived” (Hall 1980), then food is a modality by which
capitalism is lived, and made tangible in everyday practice. Revisiting the
concepts of primitive accumulation (Perelman 2000), articulation (Hall 1980),
and everyday life (Lefebvre 1991), this approach examines the ways in which
proletarianization is continually reproduced, increasingly partial or
incomplete, and contested at multiple conjunctures. In these moments of
contestation, and the spaces that partial primitive accumulation leaves behind,
new articulations - visible in the everyday social experience of food - can
contain certain potentialities for real alternatives to life under capitalism.

In this dissertation I discuss the phenomenon
of Guerrilla Gardening, which I summarise as ‘any voluntary, and potentially
illicit, gardening in space which can in some way be deemed public, over which
the gardeners hold no direct or explicit ownership.’ I engage in this
discussion in order to draw into question common sense conceptualisations of
public space as space set out for
the public, rather than a space the public can
inhabit, and be involved in its material formation. In order to fully
understand that reconceptualisation, I undertake a deeper examination of the
idea central to Guerrilla Gardening, that of gardening. Drawing on the lessons
from Science Studies, I examine the role of the nonhuman within Guerrilla
Gardening. Using an actor-network approach, I suggest that Guerrilla
Gardening’s key facet is the interaction of human and nonhuman agency. However,
I do not adopt the actornetwork thesis uncritically. Instead, I examine the
various debates that have surrounded this paradigm. I am not convinced by the
arguments proposed in ‘strong’ actor-network approaches as I find the notion of
completely symmetrical agency problematic. I thus examine the place of a ‘weak’
actor-network approach, and outline my reasons for espousing this. The material
used in this dissertation was acquired through a mixture of particpant action
research, interviewing, and analysis of various media sources in the public
domain.

The
purpose of this study was to analyze guerrilla gardening’s relationship to
urban space and social life using a critical Marxist approach. To achieve this
two case studies of urban agriculture, one of guerrilla gardening and one of
community gardening were developed. Through this comparison, guerrilla gardening
was framed as a method of spatial intervention, drawing in notions of spatial
justice and the right to the city as initially theorized by Henri Lefebvre. The
case study of guerrilla gardening focuses on Dig Kingston, a project started by
the researcher in June of 2010 and the community gardening case study will use
the Oak Street Garden, the longest standing community garden in Kingston. The
community gardening case study used content analysis and semi-structured long
format interviews with relevant actors. The guerrilla gardening case study
consisted primarily of action-based research as well as content analysis, and
semi-structured long format interviews. By contributing to the small, but
growing, number of accounts and research on guerrilla gardening this study
analyzes the unique contributions of guerrilla gardening to understandings of
urban agriculture by linking together material practices, social spaces and
envisioned or possible geographies.

Gardens of
Transgression, Spaces of Representation: An analysis of guerrilla gardens using
the works of Lefebvre as a theoretical framework

GILLIAN
WALES

Abstract

Public space in Glasgow is under
increasing pressure to produce monetary value. This research analyses the role
of guerrilla gardens within the politics of urban space. Using Lefebvre as an
analytical tool, I examine gardens as sites of spontaneity and utopian praxis,
alternative spaces where citizens have democratic involvement in shaping the
landscape. Content analysis of interview data finds that whilst participant
motivations vary; individuals are bound by a sense of legitimacy for
involvement. I argue that these diverse and somewhat disordered spaces enable
unhurried reconnection of Lefebvre’s trilectic spaces; the physical, mental and
social. Gardens are found to be sites of skills exchange and of knowledge
production. Understanding how these autonomous spaces interact with state
apparatus forms a substantial component of this qualitative research. The
effort deployed by urban governance to regulate gardens is found to be
variable, and often contradictory. Close examination of a local site of
contestation, North Kelvin Meadow, makes visible a clash between the societal
benefit derived from this non-profit garden, and an entrepreneurial ethos that
dominates state-funded local authorities. Gardens are often at the mercy of the
whims of private enterprise and public sector partners. However, the gardens
refuse to yield, their roots ground them to place and they continue to
demonstrate how powerful agency can be created merely by living.